Setting eliminationist slaughters in motion is a quintessential act of choice, freely taken, neither determined by abstract forces or structures, nor brought about accidentally by circumstances. In this case, the great man view of history—if “great” means powerful—has enormous credence in the sense that a man who can set the state in motion is necessary. Such individuals are aware of their power and of its use for furthering their political goals. They are also proud, even boastful, of their self-understood historic achievements. “I have accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months,” Morgenthau reports Talât bragging to his friends, “than [the Sultan] Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years!”7 The prime mover of exterminationist and eliminationist assaults is definitely not the inanimate implement of historical or transnational forces, material or other interests, classes, or his ethnic or religious group. But he is also not a lone godlike figure or warrior who, as kings were once naively thought to do, can move armies, nations, history itself. The prime mover is indispensible, and he has reasons of belief and reasons of politics, which are inherently intermeshed, to decide to use violence, often lethal, to eliminate the people he targets. But if the prime mover’s demotic desires are to be fulfilled, translated into murderous action, he must speak to the aspirations, wishes, fears, hatreds, resentments, and notions of the good and necessary that are held by many others. More about why our era’s mass murdering and eliminationist leaders set in motion these calamities is explained in later chapters. First we must examine how these self-styled godlike figures’ lethal dreams and initiatives get turned into earthly hells.
CHAPTER FOUR
How They Are Implemented
Three months into the Germans’ systematic annihilation of Europe’s Jews, one German perpetrator, Martin Mundschütz, though a true believer in the cause, found the gruesome killing too unnerving. Like a meat eater unable to bear the gore of the slaughterhouse, he had to get out. Referring to an earlier meeting, Mundschütz wrote his commander:Colonel, you are under the assumption that I have succumbed to a spell of weakness which will pass again without injury. Weakness was not the cause of my regrettably unmanly behavior towards you on the occasion of our discussion, rather my nerves snapped. They snapped only as a result of the nervous breakdown of three weeks ago, as a result of which visions have haunted me day and night, driving me to the verge of madness. I have partly overcome these visions, but I find that they had bereft me totally of all my energy and that I can no longer control my will. I am no longer able to contain my tears; I flee into doorways when I am in the street and I slip under covers when I am in my room.
After explaining that he had managed to conceal his condition from his comrades and prophesying that if his commander did not transfer him, his condition would become “so obvious that my name [will be] on everyone’s lips,” Mundschütz continued: If you, Herr Colonel, however, have an understanding and a heart for one of your subordinates, who wants to sacrifice himself to the very last for the cause of Germany, but who does not want to present the spectacle of one who is said to have succumbed to cowardice, then please remove me from this environment. I will thankfully return when recovered, but please allow me to leave before I succumb to the same melancholia that afflicts my mother.
How did his commander, a colonel in the SS, respond to this man’s request to stop killing? With venom? With violence? Or with solicitude? The colonel wrote his superiors:I have spoken with Mundschütz myself and tried to straighten him out. As an answer I have received from him the enclosed letter. . . . According to it, it seems all in all that a hereditary disposition of Mundschütz has asserted itself. Mundschütz is no longer fit for action. I therefore have transferred him to the rear and request that all formalities necessary for his return be completed. According to the opinion of the unit’s doctor, a transfer to the SS sanatorium for the mentally ill in Munich appears necessary.
Mundschütz was transferred home and assumed other duties. An ardent Nazi, he passionately sought admittance to the SS, the institution that had brought him into the killing fields and now considered his membership application without prejudice, his refusal to kill notwithstanding.1
This spectacle of a whimpering, “cowardly” executioner, who approves of the killing and who is treated with understanding by the supposedly most unforgiving SS, gives lie to many misconceptions about the German perpetrators and, as we will see, about the perpetrators of mass murder in general. The most egregious misconception is that perpetrators are incapable of reflecting on the desirability of mass slaughter or their own participation in it. As this episode suggests, if we want to understand eliminationist perpetrators, then we must eschew the prevailing, thoughtless clichés about “human nature,” blind obedience to authority, bureaucratic mindsets, or irresistible social psychological pressure. Instead, we must investigate the killers, asking how and why they do what they do.
Both scholars and nonscholars have assumed that when a leader orders people to be eliminated, his followers do it reflexively, and that the unhuman, so-called machinery of destruction, like a machine, inexorably begins to roll forward. This assumption, most prevalent in writings about the Holocaust, was so powerful that for the first several decades of the investigation of mass murder, the perpetrators and their own understanding of their actions were not topics of serious scholarly inquiry. Almost no research was done on the perpetrators and almost no actual knowledge about them existed. What substituted for knowledge was an array of false notions, some having achieved mythological status, about the Holocaust’s perpetrators, the institutions of killing, and its essential features.
It was wrongly believed that the Holocaust’s perpetrators were all or principally SS men, that they were relatively small in number, that they had to kill, and that modern technology itself made the genocide possible. (These notions still circulate in the popular media and unscholarly writing.) Something as basic as the number of perpetrators was therefore unknown and not even raised as a question in the central works on the Holocaust. Dehumanizing and virtually racist clichés about so-called German national character informed many. Who the killers were, how they joined killing institutions, what life was like while killing, what they thought of their victims and their deeds, what choices they had, and what choices they made about treating their victims—these and other questions were left uninvestigated. On the rare occasions that such questions were asked, they were answered with empirically barren speculation presented as settled fact.
Until my book Hitler’s Willing Executioners directly took issue with this historical neglect, what was true about the Holocaust’s investigation, which antedated the study of other mass murders by decades, has by and large been true about other mass murders. Thus, when Michael Kaufman, trying to make sense of the Serbs’ onslaught against Kosovars in 1999, deemed it necessary to plumb the motives of the Serbian perpetrators, he wrote in the New York Times that the time had come to ask “the kinds of questions raised in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book.”2 Even today, untenable assumptions about why people follow orders to annihilate thousands or millions of people remain rife in the literature on mass murder. Little has been written on the institutions of mass slaughter and elimination. Few empirically grounded conclusions have been put forward about why mass murders, or eliminations, get implemented, and in the manner and with the means that they do.
This subject is explosive. Shifting attention away from monstrous, supposedly irresistible leaders, from abstractions such as a “terror apparatus,” and from faceless institutions such as the German SS (or Saddam’s Republican Guards, the Serbs’ Arkan’s Tigers, and others) forces people to confront the humanity of the perpetrators and their horrifying acts, and to ask difficult questions, deemed threatening by many, about the societies and cultures that bred such people. Confronting perpetrators—one man, then another, then another—also forces people to face the overwhelming, undoable necessity of bringing thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, or even hundreds o
f thousands of people to justice for committing murder. People on all sides would generally prefer (some are desperate) to sidestep this task, to get on with life, and so are content to blame leaders and a few unusually barbarous killers. It should therefore have come as no surprise that when Hitler’s Willing Executioners was published, an international explosion ensued that lasted years. In being a broad and unvarnished study of the Holocaust’s German perpetrators, the book made their humanity unavoidable. By forcing these themes before the public and answering these questions, it overturned misconceptions about the Holocaust, including about Germany’s political culture before and during the Nazi period. Rejecting customary abstractions and the ahistorical and incoherent implication of humanity itself in the mass murder (the “anyone would have done it” refrain), it focused on the actual human beings, principally though not exclusively Germans, who actually committed and supported the mass murder and other eliminationist acts.
An in-depth study could be done on the German perpetrators, because a wealth of information exists about them—from the vast testimony of survivors and of the perpetrators themselves, collected after the war by Germany’s legal authorities. Only a fraction of such information exists for other mass murderers. Generally, little is known about the killing institutions and their members. Hence, an analysis of why and how the perpetrators implemented most exterminationist and eliminationist programs relies on less voluminous and good information (substantial knowledge about the defeated Hutu killers in Rwanda has been emerging). Overall conclusions must be provisional and tentative, until more complete information is uncovered about other mass eliminations (though it is unlikely to happen about most of them).
Mass murder and eliminations begin because, in seemingly opportune circumstances, leaders decide to address their “problems” with “final solutions” or near-final ones that usually employ a combination of eliminationist means. Yet leaders do not perpetrate the crime alone. So the analysis must venture beyond the leaders, their worldviews, and their decision-making circumstances, to a range of institutional, logistical, and human factors that map what must occur for the killing and eliminationist acts to proceed.
Mass elimination operations are often mammoth: the vast number of victims (hundreds of thousands, millions, even tens of millions) and of perpetrators (tens, hundreds of thousands, even millions); the operations’ geographic size can be a country or a continent; the places to attack or comb through can run into the thousands; the coordination of the many institutions and perpetrators can be extensive and complex. It should come as no surprise, then, that substantial planning often precedes the actual murderous and eliminationist onslaughts. It should also come as no surprise that, for two reasons, this strategic planning typically focuses on killing targeted peoples’ elites, the most dangerous portion of the people who are most likely to organize resistance.
The Turks carried out such detailed preparation and targeting of elites. For months they planned a coordinated lethal assault on Turkey’s Armenians, raised the units that would spearhead it, and drew up lists of the Armenian elites to be killed immediately. The Germans similarly had planning offices working out the programs for the elimination of the Jews in Germany and throughout Europe, and for eliminating Poles and others from territories that Germans wished to repopulate with Germans. Before the Germans began Soviet Jews’ systematic annihilation, they created and mobilized, among other units, the Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads. Before the Germans began the assault on each country’s or territory’s Jews, they planned and coordinated the assault’s different aspects, and in many places, starting with Germany itself, the strategy included creating a pseudolegal foundation that itself composed one facet of the eliminationist program and provided a basis for the upcoming intensified attacks.
The Khmer Rouge, anything but the embodiment of modern forward thinking, nevertheless knew what they would do upon taking power. They immediately embarked on the most thoroughgoing and precipitous expulsion in human history—emptying Cambodian cities, towns, and villages in a few days. They also proceeded to murder Cambodia’s elites, slaughtering former government and military officials, doctors, lawyers, teachers, other professionals, anyone with evidence of an advanced education. The Hutu leadership similarly conducted extensive planning for the eventual annihilation of the Tutsi. The preparation may have begun four years before implementation. It included raising and training units, drawing up lists of Tutsi elites to be killed, coordinating the assaults nationwide, and undertaking more than a dozen exploratory killings. Major Brent Beardsley, the executive assistant to General Romeo Dallaire, the UN commander in Rwanda during the genocide, explains: “In the space of one day, [the perpetrators] amputated the entire moderate leadership of Rwanda; by that night, they were all dead. They and their families were dead. A lot of the leadership within the Tutsi community was dead. They had targeted all that day, and they had succeeded. So this was extremely well planned, well organized and well conducted. This was not something that was just spontaneous.” 3 In each case—and this is true of many others, including in the Soviet Union, China, Kenya, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sudan—the nature of eliminationist political leaders’ planning varies, depending on a host of differences among the countries, settings, and intentions behind each eliminationist assault. Yet there are some constants.
Political leaders must find people to carry out the eliminationist program. What are the identities, recruitment procedures, and motivations of the perpetrators? The leaders must organize these people within institutions. What institutions are they? Do the leaders use existing ones or create new ones? How do the institutions function? The perpetrators must gain access to the victims. How do they choose and identify them? The perpetrators must then implement the program. What are its logistics and what means do they use?
The annihilation cannot happen instantaneously (except with nuclear weapons, massive airpower or artillery targeting civilians, or fully fueled aircraft), so at what pace and for how long do the perpetrators kill and eliminate their targets? The perpetrators often have more extensive contact with the victims than merely the instant of execution, and they are often charged with other, nonlethal tasks. What else do they do to the victims? The victims themselves are not inert. When are they able to resist their would-be murderers, and with what consequences?
The answers to these questions vary. Sometimes the best that can be done is to describe the variations and to unearth certain patterns, while seeking to account for the similarities and differences among onslaughts, and to assess how critical each of these subjects is for explaining mass annihilations and eliminations more broadly. Ultimately, we wish to know why the perpetrators kill. Why do they brutally expel people from their homes, regions, and countries? Why do they subject their victims to many other forms of deprivation and suffering? Why do the perpetrators not say no?
The Perpetrators
A perpetrator is anyone who knowingly contributes in some tangible way to the deaths or elimination of others, or to injuring others as part of an annihilationist or an eliminationist program. This includes people killing at close range or by protracted means, such as starvation. It includes people setting the stage for the lethal blow, by identifying victims, rounding them up, moving them to the killing sites, or guarding them at any stage of the elimination process. It includes people more distant from the deed. Leaders creating the killing and elimination programs, and those working closely with and in support of them, and lesser officials contributing to the fashioning or transmitting of eliminationist policies or orders, are perpetrators. People supplying material or logistical support to killing institutions are perpetrators. What exactly a person perpetrates, and for what exactly he should be legally and morally culpable, depends on what he does in aiding what kinds of eliminationist ends. If he orders or organizes or has a ministerial or command role in institutions that take part in the eliminationist programs, then he is a perpetrator of the overall mass murder or eliminationist pro
gram. If he kills or facilitates the killing of many people, then he is a perpetrator of mass murder. If he helps to drive people from their home and country, then he is a perpetrator of eliminationist expulsion. If he beats and tortures people but somehow manages to do nothing to contribute to people’s deaths, then he is a perpetrator of assault and torture. What the minimum is that a person must do to cross the legal and moral threshold into culpability can be debated. But for those participating in eliminationist onslaughts, the need to explain why each perpetrator acts, which includes how each one understands the victims and his own deeds, applies to the person rounding up the victims, and the one organizing killing logistics, as much as it does to the person mowing down the victims or hacking them to death.
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